Rob Jackaman: an introduction to the poetry and the poet.

Paterson, Alistair

Rob Jackaman isn't what one would expect of a New Zealand poet. In the first place, he wasn't born in the county and in the second his career is exactly the reverse of that of such Antipodean expatriates as Katherine Mansfield, Dan Davin, Fleur Adcock, and of a number of lesser known writers who have gone overseas seeking to advance their literary careers.

In 1968 he came to New Zealand to take up PhD studies at Auckland University under the tutelage of C. K. Stead whose The New Poetic (1) had caught his imagination in the previous year while he was a student at Kings College, Cambridge. Again, this was a variation on the pattern set by other and earlier British expatriates such as Charles Doyle and Peter Bland who initially arrived in New Zealand in the early fifties for other reasons and then launched themselves on to the New Zealand literary scene. Jackaman is the only British-born poet of note to have come here solely to advance his poetic and academic careers and who has remained in the country expressly to continue these vocations.

His first collection, Hemispheres, which was published in 1976 by the Caxton Press of Christchurch, contains amongst readily recognisable New Zealand writing some of the poems he wrote while still in England. These earlier poems, together with some of the the later pieces, demonstrate his initial facility with verse:

 January, with plenty of places to go
 But nowhere to hide
 How cold it was, and later
 In the vacant indifference of March he had been
 looking
 For something to justify such penance ...

 ('Cambridge Calendar')

While this may not be the most distinctive of poetry; it is at least equal in quality to many of the first volumes published here and overseas. Yet Jackaman's first collection was less than favourably received. Lauris Edmond observed that 'Hemispheres depressed' her, 'made [her] think of figures of speech, stylistic devices, the mechanics of poetry writing. Or computers--if you were to feed [in] some good advice about literary construction.., these poems might be the result'. (2) John Davidson expressed a similar view when he recognised the predominance of Pound as an influence but stated that he had 'serious reservations about Jackaman's poetry' and that it 'lack[ed] that something, the spark that makes all the difference'. (3) Newspaper reviewers--with few exceptions--were similarly unenthusiastic (4)

Like other expatriates however, once he had arrived in New Zealand Jackaman discovered that the experience was 'something different, something nobody counted on'. He was faced with the not uncommon problem of how to recognise who one is when many of the usual and familiar reference points have disappeared. And this is a question of some significance for poets who employ a specific persona as a centring device in their writing. In Jackaman's case it was necessary to have that persona respond to a New Zealand social, physical and intellectual environment which was to a large extent foreign to him and even in the sixties and seventies noticeably different from what was then extant in England.

Thus the principal theme of Hemispheres is that of dislocation and estrangement. Through identifying contrasts and differences Jackaman gives his alter ego (his literary persona) the attribute of a heightened sensitivity which acknowledges that he is himself no longer an English poet nor yet a New Zealand poet either. Most of the poems in this first collection are characterised by geographic concerns, by locations and dislocations and a marked leaning towards the Americans--Creeley; Berryman and more particularly, Pound: (5)

 At Lyttelton we brought the ship to shore
 (The anchorage, and a pilot guiding us)
 And silently we waited,
 Dusk smoking with hills
 Of houses leaning
 Over us, and lights
 Of many T.V. sets in Circe's ingle.

 ('Australasia: Nekuia')

His interest in Pound carried with it the irascible Ezra's sense of dislocation and the Poundian affection for Odysseus, the archetypal traveller and universal adventurer who has always appealed to New Zealand writers. As might be expected and as Hemispheres demonstrates, Jackaman's relatively late arrival didn't allow him to escape the traditional concerns of Pakeha New Zealand poets--the sense of isolation Curnow made so much of, their feelings of dislocation and their problems of identity. It forced him to rework such concerns for himself.

These first poems which he wrote in New Zealand, competent as they might have been for a young writer beginning to feel his way in a strange environment, didn't attract much attention or gain him any great support from other writers. This was partly the result of the negative reviewing Hemispheres received, and partly because of Jackaman's personal reticence in regard to publicising himself. The atmosphere of the times might also have played a part. In the sixties and seventies New Zealand poets (particularly the younger poets--Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, Riemke Ensing and their associates) were trying to make a break from British models and the British tradition that had up until then dominated the English departments of New Zealand universities. (6) They tended to distance themselves from things British and writers who were older than themselves. Similarly; New Zealand poets of the previous generation were having their own difficulties in coming to terms with changing circumstances, and if they had noticed the newcomer, they didn't demonstrate much sympathy for him.

After completing his PhD in the early seventies, Jackaman took up an appointment in the English Department of the University of Canterbury where, amongst his more conventional work, he lectured on Pound, Yeats and Eliot. This second relocation took him from the lively literary centre of Auckland to Christchurch, a city with a longstanding enthusiasm for the arts, but with conservative leanings typified by occasional outbursts from the city fathers against things new or radical. In any case, while many of the citizens of Christchurch were still pleased to think of themselves as living in a city 'more British than the British', the Caxton and Pegasus Presses had lost much of their mid-century vigour (7) and had entered into a more conservative phase of publishing endeavour.

Although it's something of a generalisation, in the 1970S neither the editors of Landfall (8) nor those writing for it seemed to be interested in postmodernism or the controversies surrounding it, nor did they show any great interest in the discussion of poetics other than in post-imperial terms. Fortunately for Jackaman, the Christchurch College of Education had recently acquired Michael Harlow, a wide-ranging surrealist and Greek-American poet, as one of its lecturers in English. The two writers soon became acquainted and from time to time worked in collaboration on various performance projects--with the result that Jackaman was constantly in touch with someone for whom contemporary American writing was a living and vigorous influence and whose commitment to poetry was as great as his own.

In spite of frequent contact with Michael Harlow and correspondence with a number of Australian writers and myself, then editor of the New Zealand literary journal Mate (the initiator of Creeley's 1976 Australasian tour), throughout the seventies, Jackaman's British background continued to persist as one of the main features of his writing. In 1975, he published Arthur the King, (9) and in 1976 followed this up with Lee: A Science Fiction Poem. Initially, the two titles appear somewhat at odds with each other but their texts reveal similarities as well as differences. Both are written in sharp bursts of words whose short phrase-units link back to Pound's Cantos and give shape to the line lengths. In the second of these two works, there is an increasing sharpness in the language (almost a staccato effect) and an increased breaking of the earlier line format which demonstrates the poet's wrestling with linguistic structure and his striving towards a greater variety and flexion in the text:

 Listen
 To the wind
 Blowing from steppes in the east
 Over the beaten down dunes
 And the villages huddled around
 The churches, rich inside
 Though to the eye pale grey
 Under the wolfish wind.

 Arthur the King: A Sequence

 And he remembered the machines
 Crammed end to end in the
 Arc-lit arena
 Of the motorway Burning

 Then on his hill
 Spreading his arms out
 Over his kingdom to
 Cry I
 Am the resurrection all
 That was dead lives

 By my touch
 (Piecing the past world Without end)

 Lee: A Science Fiction Poem

Arthur the King and Lee, relatively short though they may be, are lengthy enough to be recognised as precursors to Jackaman's later and longer poems. They also demonstrate another characteristic of his texts (particularly those written in the seventies)--an academic quality which is derived from his British background and his occupation as a university teacher. Both of these poems carry quotations and fragments from other works--fragments which signify their wider linguistic contexts. In the case of Arthur, the background is Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, while in Lee, it is William Golding's Pincher Martin:

the dominant features are linguistic connections with Pound and the British tradition as modified by the psycho-social conditions of the period and the location in which they were written. (10) A little later, and perhaps at the same time as Arthur and Lee were being produced, Jackaman was working on translations from the Japanese (Hiroshima Poems of Sankichi Toge, translated with Dennis Logan and Tsutomu Shioda, 1977). He also composed a monograph on the process of writing (Creative Writing: Creative Reading, 1977). While this text was primarily intended for secondary school students, most of it was written from the personal point of view of the way Jackaman saw himself operating:

 ... a poet's individual method of writing must be largely personal,
 and worked out to some extent through trial and error: that is, a
 poet usually begins in the dark, and fumbles his way towards the
 light, gaining confidence and experience as he goes ... in the end
 each individual will evolve the method which suits himself best. (11)

What the text says about the writing process seems to be a common subjective experience for many practising poets. More personal is the comment:

 I try to turn talk into art, to give the poetry precision and
 concentration, by centring my efforts (at least initially) on
 producing concrete, striking, visual images which I then work into
 clusters or patterns to give the poetry an inner coherence. I think
 it's important, to start with actual experience gleaned from the
 actual world by careful observation--and if possible, to see things
 in a new light, or from an unexpected angle. (12)

This emphasis on 'actual experience', as simple as it may appear initially, hides a multitude of problems at all sorts of levels: those concerning the nature of 'reality', the problem of 'the meaning of meaning'; questions of epistemology; causality, the nature of the 'self', and recent theories of knowledge and of authorial presence. In Jackaman's case, it principally concerns the question of direct experience per se, and experience of the text as a 'given'. Thus, while Jackaman assumes he is starting with direct experience, this very quickly merges into, or is replaced by references to other texts and becomes transformed into something else--the poem itself. The textuality of his writing is clearly demonstrated in what could be considered his best work of the seventies- The Fate of Franklin--which was originally intended to be published in a limited; hand-set edition from Underoak Press but which was first printed in a shortened form in 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets (1980). It later appeared as part of a trilogy of longer poems in Solo Lovers (1981).

Franklin, as can be seen from the internal evidence, its accompanying illustrations and 'found' segments, is derived from a reading of Roderic Owen's The Fate of Franklin (London: Hutchinson, 1978), a text which re-examines Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the North West passage. If the poem has a beginning in personal experience, then it is Jackaman's personal life as well as his reading which gives the poem its intensity--that gives it a life and unity of its own, and a sense of completeness which is perhaps unusual for a poet so obviously influenced by Pound and the postmoderns. Franklin is composed around historical events and textual material taken from Owen's book, and is enriched by a language which is more flexible, a little less staccato and much more confident than was the case with the poet's earlier work:

 ... life veers
 To a colder hemisphere,
 visions of ice menacing
 Vessels hunched against the gale
 As people navigate
 streaming streets
 Squashed between blocks rearing
 Ice-bergs of glass. You walk
 Down the road and always a passer-by
 Is losing grip,
 one disappears under the surface,
 One starves; they're crying for help
 But the wind drowns them as they clutch
 At spars of light thrown out
 From shop windows crowded with warmth.

 In their eyes
 are fingers of sea
 Weed weaving through water,
 dark rocks
 Reflecting with lichen mottled green or brown.
 Look into them and see yourself.

 ('Fate of Franklin')

It would be reasonable to expect poetry of this quality to be given a place in the major New Zealand anthologies (either the Penguin or the Oxford)--particularly when other expatriate poets and writers were receiving such recognition. Bland for example, reached New Zealand in the 1950s and had been noticed early--not only for his writing, but also for his prominence as an actor and his contribution to the development of New Zealand theatre. As an actor, he was more visible than Jackaman and it's possible that his more noticeable participation in New Zealand life may have helped his poetic career. Russell Haley on the other hand, arrived about the same time as Jackaman and rose to prominence in the late sixties and early seventies as a member of the Freed group (13). While both have been referred to in the recently published Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, Jackaman isn't mentioned.

His Fate of Franklin, however, is something more than merely the product of an expatriate British poet living in the antipodes. The poem includes many of the traditional elements and interests of New Zealand poets: their romanticism, their traditional concern with the loss of love--the trials of Odysseus and the solitude and dislocations felt by their nineteenth century predecessors. But the isolation and estrangement running through the work are not derived solely from texts. They are things poets have to experience for themselves--sometimes through geographical dislocation, sometimes through the mishaps and events that occur in their personal lives. Events such as these, as well as Jackaman's reading of Owen's text, have coalesced into producing the cold intensity of language characteristic of Franklin--a genuine breakthrough and a step beyond Arthur the King, Hemispheres and Lee, which at more than 350 lines (excluding material from other sources) indicated Jackaman's developing preference for the longer poem.

In 1978, Underoak Press published The Suffolk Miracle, a sequence that reasserted Jackaman's British origins. Yet there was other evidence which showed his increasing acclimatisation within the New Zealand environment. Shaman and Charlatan, Poems Since 1973 (1981) contains passages that are immediately locatable in the South Island of New Zealand and which possess links with the poems of Brasch and Glover, and the earlier work of Baxter:

 Mainly the rain
 And the river's hungry
 Roar in the throats of canyons
 And the drumming on our roof
 All afternoon and into evening ...

and again:

 Waking sour
 As an ill-natured wife.
 With the bad taste of yesterday's
 Anger still poisoning I
 saw that the rain had stopped
 For a time and the mountain
 Watching
 The marriage breaking up....

 ('A Mount Cook Trilogy')

Solo Lovers, published in Australia in 1982 by South Head Press, contains the Franklin sequence and two other poems: 'Crowhurst' (14) and 'Love Rite: Some Poems for Mary'. When the three texts are taken together it can be seen that their intensity isn't only derived from textual reference but also from the personal life of Jackaman himself--the collapse of his marriage, his relationships with other people and the events involved in these. Thus it seems that Franklin and Crowhurst are alter egos of Jackaman, and that the poems in which they are placed are transignifications of isolation and solitude as metaphors for personal loss. The textual exploration of the tribulations of the historic Franklin and the more recent hardships of Crowhurst reinforce this view:

 The regular pressure of the pencil on
 The page may give you away
 When you're faking it, no sign
 Of excitement or fear, no
 Sirens and sharks surfacing
 Between the solid strokes
 Of the sea's clock. How can I
 Turn round now, thread my way through
 The maze of this journey, trade
 Myself in for a suburb, walk back
 Over dried husks' grating....

 ('Crowhurst')

The third sequence in Solo Lovers deals unexpectedly and directly; with personal matters. The title, 'Love Rite: Some Poems for Mary', indicates the new approach and suggests a movement away from textual reference and towards a more direct methodology--perhaps with the advantage of greater accessibility for readers who would rather not work hard at their reading or concern themselves with references to other texts:

 If you open the door in my chest
 The one with the sign saying what you love
 will be taken down
 And used against you--you'll see
 Through the ribs of the bushes a river,
 At this point, out of indifference
 Never bridged ...

And again:

 scattered with small birds
 Making marks in the bank, a lull
 Stirred only by a shallow pulse as if
 Someone sometime had a heart once.

 ('Bridges')

In Love Rite the text becomes more lyrical and the language less formal and more flexible. At the same time it preserves the broken line structure which is so characteristic of Jackaman. His practice as a poet is catching up with the theories he presented in Creative Writing: Creative Reading--particularly those concerned with personal experience in poetry:

 Obviously, personal experience is highly significant in poetry: it
 provides the only immediate raw material we have at our disposal.
 But that doesn't mean that by indulging ourselves in personal
 material we're creating meaningful poetry. It's good to start from
 personal material but ... the poetic act must involve more than
 pouring out our souls. (15)

Like other people, poets don't operate completely in the present nor are they always consistent in their beliefs, and at this later date most of us would probably disagree with many of the observations made in Creative Writing. Reference to 'soul' for example, appears particularly inappropriate to the contemporary eye while many might consider 'personal experience' as 'raw material' in the same light. Nevertheless, 'Love Rite' demonstrates a more world-related use of signifiers than is the case in Jackaman's earlier work, and more obviously exploits the possibilities of presenting material derived from personal experience.

Other significations of Jackaman's poetry have been identified by Hugh Lauder in his March 1984 Landfall (16) review of Solo Lovers:

 The sequences, are arranged symphonically, with major and minor
 themes linking them. The major theme in the first two sequences
 speaks of the need to risk death in order to live a complete life.
 The minor theme, cleverly integrated in the two sequences as the
 memories of Franklin and Crowhurst, explores the relationship
 between love and death. In the final sequence it emerges as the
 dominant theme.

Observations like this are helpful in analysing such complex texts, but Lauder's concern with traditional leitmotifs relating to a world outside the poem is a debatable criterion for literary evaluation. 'The promise of the tensions and contrasts Jackaman has set up between Franklin and Crowhurst', Lauder claims, 'is never fulfilled', and therefore the Jackaman trilogy lacks the tension 'necessary if the poem is to remain alive in our imagination'. In reality, 'the promise' he identifies exists only in Lauder's imagination. The three pieces in Solo Lovers aren't related in this way; they are separate and distinct poems which have been written in different periods of time and placed together for publishing convenience in the same way as are the short and disparate poems usually found in other collections. (17)

Other New Zealand reviewers also reported unfavourably on Solo Lovers. Louis Johnson, for example, commented, 'There is little to sustain the view that good ... love poetry has eventuated. Indeed the overall sense is that the book is badly titled, unless one takes it that "Solo Lovers" is itself the kind of undertaking ventured upon with only a pen in hand'. (18) In Australia however, Tom Shapcott took another point of view:

 Solo Lovers, is a readable and engrossing book precisely because of
 the elegy that persists under the staccato lines, the broken
 phrases, the juxtaposed montage documents ... [Pound's] Cantos have
 hovered in Antipodean circles for a long time, but it is only
 recently--in the work of Millett and Jackaman--that I sense a
 thoroughly absorbed, appropriating, self-referential cutting-up and
 cutting away from them. (19)

Jackaman's more recent publications, Palimpsest (1988) and Triptych (1989), are so closely related to each other that it could be assumed they were written almost at the same time. In fact, although Palimpsest appeared a couple of months before Triptych, chronologically their writing overlapped and their publication should have been reversed. (20)

In the case of Triptych, the title refers to both the linguistic structure of the text and the physical structure of the book itself. The work is divided into three sections: 'Riccarton Suite', (21) 'Stress Fractures', and the final section, 'Black Windows'. The front and reverse covers of the book carry colour photographs of the front and reverse sides of 'Black Windows', a painting by Ralph Hotere. These illustrations, together with the book itself, form a triptych which matches the triple division of the text as if it were a room with windows at either end. The implication is that the text is to present symbols within symbols--as indeed, it does. This new book introduces a surrealistic quality into Jackaman's writing--a form of writing he has seldom used before but which he's taught at the University of Canterbury for more than twenty years.

Its major persona is 'Jackaman' the poet--a central and ever present sensibility whose concerns, in addition to the earlier ones of identity, personal relationships and crises, now involve the metaphysical. Triptych presents a 'subject' who is located psychologically as well as physically in New Zealand, and is striving to find new meanings and give fresh significance to this location. In the process, the texts move a little closer to those of other New Zealand poets. The line structures are looser than was the case in Solo Lovers, and they carry occasional echoes of Curnow:

 ... trees are doing
 what they've always done--watch the rain rain
 ... (22), trees with what trees do ...

 ('Riccarton Suite')

Small but visible signs of this looser and more informal approach are included in the abandonment of the upper case letter at the beginning of each line (a device which now seems totally anachronistic in contemporary texts) and an increased frequency in the use of colloquialisms and abbreviations ('they've' for 'they have'). Line breaks and lacunae, although previously common in The Fate of Franklin and Solo Lovers, are now employed with complete confidence:

 ... Only some inches away as the map
 flies you can watch the real world happen
 on the golf course, out near the airport ...

 ('Riccarton Suite')

The problem Jackaman's persona wrestles with in 'Riccarton Suite' and outside it is the significance of the individual human life--in this case the double irony presented in the lines above, of his persona watching 'the real world/happen/on [a] golf course, out near [an] airport'. This first part of Triptych also reflects what happens to many people when they reach their middle years and discover that what seemed to be significant earlier now lacks value and meaning, and has ceased to be a source of direction, of drive and energy. The dilemma of the historic and the textual Jackamans (both of them) and their difficulties in developing personal relationships suddenly become one and the same:

 off Labrador shore the chart holds
 in stasis as the sun checks the downward drift
 of arctic ice and harp seals come
 to be clubbed to death. Do you remember
 my love watching
 as we waited
 to construct a new someone for ourselves
 to be?

 ('Riccarton Suite')

The problem of identity which Jackaman seems to have rediscovered at this point, repeats itself in various ways throughout the 'Riccarton Suite' section of Triptych and is given a more objective form in its textual transference onto other personae--including 'the man at 41' who 'still sleeps around enough to keep up appearances'. A recognisably dominant element, however, is the text's increasing reference to religious belief, and a marked irony which gives emphasis to an absence of significance in 'life':

 The Mormons are at it again,
 breaking and entering lives for Christ
 The Catholic girl on the corner is impervious
 and has been talking to the neighbours
 so she won't take up my offer either
 but then I wouldn't go out with
 a girl who'd go out with a guy
 like me ...

 ('Riccarton Suite')

'Stress Fractures', the second section of Triptych, takes these themes still further. It demonstrates that the poet as 'subject' has now acquired a firm sense of geographical location in a textual version of New Zealand. It combines an increasing intensity of feeling and surrealism with Lewis Carroll's Mice, Michael Dransfield (the Australian poet), Hekla (a volcanic island in Iceland), and a 'White Lady' reminiscent of an updated 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. Disparate as these elements appear, they coalesce effectively and demonstrate that under the bland surface of suburbia ('Riccarton' of 'Riccarton Suite') the buildings are unstable, marked by 'stress fractures'; further, 'Jackaman' the persona in his real life might not be holding together as well as appearances suggest:

 When I woke my life
 didn't fit any more: my body
 pinched at the armpits and toes

 ('Stress Fractures')

The third section of Triptych, uses the title of Hotere's cover painting, 'Black Windows'--which is appropriate because from a textual point of view the two earlier sections require resolution, some means of ascribing significance to the work as a whole. 'Black Windows' does this by reversing what might have been expected--by imposing an opaque where a transparency might have been anticipated. And again, the black window concept gives a denial to the traditional belief of poetry and art as offering windows to the world--a viewing place from which the writer's reality can be examined. The poem moves towards but doesn't reach the final entropy that could have been expected--it doesn't become completely devoid of difference and therefore of meaning :

 ... She stands by the mirror
 nude and sees joins where the shards
 have parted; the zippers under her breasts
 begin to gape. In the bowels of her home
 she hears the wash-house zombie turn
 itself off, the bedroom zombie turn itself
 on, keeping up appearances. No one
 would believe this, she thinks, any more
 than visitors from outer space ...

 ('Black Windows')

Irrespective of the poems references to specific and actual locations, there are on-going implications that the text has no fixed geographic reference, that the act of naming is more significant than the places named, and that the geographical locations possess no more than a perilous and (at best) improbable existence. In the context of the poetry; place names signify nothing and nowhere. This negative quality which pervades the whole of Triptych and appears characteristic of Jackaman, paradoxically suggests its opposite--particularly in the last section which is entitled 'Mapmakers' and which again raises the geographical question and tells us:

 a splash of paint either by accident
 or design has broken through the wooden
 square. In the empty living room flecks
 of dust drift through bars of sun
 for a moment becoming stars.

 ('Black Windows')

Palimpsest, one of the most recent of the Jackaman texts, is placed even more firmly in New Zealand than the preceding volume. This is emphasised by the provision of an initial statement of location (Oamaru and related sites in the South Island) and a list of dramatis personae immediately before the the poem begins. Following these a reference to one of Pound's later Cantos (23) discloses the source of the title--'the record/the palimpsest/a little light/in great darkness'--a quotation which refers back to the' Black Windows' concept and its well-known biblical antecedent. In addition, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'palimpsest' is given verbatim. This, in company with some of the more confessional poems already discussed, makes it easy to understand what's going on.

Originally many of the buildings in Oamaru were built of white Oamaru stone. One of the characteristics of this particular stone is the ease with which graffiti can be applied, erased, and reapplied (palimpsest--paper or parchment prepared for writing on and wiping out again like a slate). The same concept might be applied to the way in which modern cities are built up, erased and built again, and to the temporary and transcendental nature of things human--of buildings, towns, cities and people:

 Cliffed round in the quarry's arms
 here it begins in geological time
 outside scale, air almost
 ecstatic in blinding white
 light on the brink of hysteria
 at the tumbled slabs Greek ruins
 waiting to get built ...

 (Palimpsest)

At the same time, and using variously sourced combinations of poetic technique, the text sets out to establish an operational base in which Jackaman and his readers can locate themselves. As is common with much postmodern writing such as Ian Wedde's shorter whaling piece, (24) some of these methodologies refer back to Charles Olson's Maximus; yet they are as solidly rooted in nineteenth-century textual New Zealand as are many of Kendrick Smithyman's poems. The prose quotations (particularly those from the 1830S) demonstrate this: 'Thursday, 23rd.--Strong breezes and much rain, lowered 3 boats, killed a cow whale and anchored her with two anchors ...'. (25)

These various and at first glance unlikely combinations of texts and colloquialisms set up a rich, holistic cross-texture which exploits both objective and personal significations--and even refer (successfully) to some of the occasions and circumstances involved in Jackaman's writing of earlier poems:

 But the derelict and empty have
 their kind of beauty too--the town
 full of poems printed through it.
 By here I wrote 'Franklin' and on Wanbrow
 with the gulls 'Crowhurst' ...

 ('Palimpsest')

To locate one's self is to give names to a place, and it is in this kind of activity that the last of these texts succeeds. It provides Jackaman and his readers with a set of locations which both can relate to--locations which may or may not (in a linguistic sense) represent a set of specific geographic features, but which are visible and aesthetically satisfying solutions to a wide variety of textual problems relating to history and place. And again, the poem also employs some of the negative attributes of location found in Curnow's earlier poetry--but this indicates the complexity of the problems poetry can raise and to a good measure it resolves writing difficulties that might otherwise be insoluble.

Jackaman's next book, Distances: Poems 1985--90, (26) enlarges and extends his range still further. The collection is dedicated (as was his Arthur the King sequence) to the late Leo Bensemann, painter, printer, one-time editor of Landfall, and life-long supporter of New Zealand art and literature. The opening section is addressed directly to Bensemann in the manner of a private letter or personal monologue which allows Jackaman to state something of his own position as an artist and writer in relation to what he sees as Bensemann's parallel situation:

 We grew away from Europe, you and I, though
 never entirely: often a word
 or brush stroke drew us back to some lost
 image set uneasily in antipodean green.

 (Distances)

Perhaps Jackaman has got it right. He, like other New Zealanders, has grown away from Europe. Over the last fifty years we have become more assuredly cosmopolitan and more assuredly ourselves--and in a way that the tenth-century Maori progenitors of this country, its nineteenth-century European settlers, its more recent arrivals and expatriates couldn't in their wildest imaginings have anticipated. In recent years we've not so much abandoned Europe as become a part of the larger world Jackaman is writing about. Distances is an urbane, sophisticated collection which employs a sinuous, assured and professional tone and ranges right across the socio-geographic spectrum--sometimes in the manner of David Lodge (Small WarM), and always in the sense of that contemporary cosmopolitanism that has been created by the current ease of international air travel and the ubiquitous television set:

 A deep bird inside her talks to wolves
 (dead or alive) salmon skid down the rivers
 of her heart in Haida country kuganaa
 trees bare as witches at Nootka, fluting
 by Victoria whales that Europeans
 chased all the way to New Zealand ...

(Distances)

This latest book, together with the large and accomplished body of poetry which now stands to Jackaman's credit, marks him out as currently (after Curnow) the most prolific of New Zealand's exponents of the longer form, and should eventually bring him a greater measure of recognition in New Zealand than has so far been the case. His reputation is growing overseas, particularly in Australia where his writing appears regularly in Poetry Australia. Yet apart from 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets (1980), in which an abbreviated version of Franklin appeared, nothing of it has been represented in any of the New Zealand anthologies. On the strength of what he has accomplished to date, it seems safe to assume that it won't be long before Jackaman is seen as the significant New Zealand poet that his work now shows him to be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books:

Arthur the King. Underoak Press: Christchurch, 1975, 21 pp.

Hemispheres: Poems 1965-73. Caxton Press: Christchurch, 1976, 54

PP-Lee: A Science Fiction Poem. Underoak Press: Christchurch, 1976, 22 pp.

Hiroshima Poems of Sankichi Tage (translated with Dennis Logan and

Tsutomu Shioda). Sanyu-sha: Tokyo, 1977, 183 pp. Creative Writing/Creative Reading. College Press: Christchurch, 1977, 55 PP.

The Suffolk Miracle. Underoak Press: Christchurch, 1978, 12 posters. Shaman and Charlatan: Poems since 1973. Cicada Press: Auckland, 1981, 42 pp.

Solo Lovers: Three Sequences of Poems. South Head Press: Sydney, 1982, 36 pp.

Triptych: Poems since 1981. Hazard Press: Christchurch, 1988/9, 63 pp.

Palimpsest: An Historical Sequence. Caxton Press: Christchurch, 1988/9, 54 pp.

The Course of English Surrealist Poetry Since the 1930s. Edwin Mellen Press: New York, 1989, 325 pp.

Distances: Poems 1989-90. Hazard Press: Christchurch, forthcoming.

Parts of Books:

'Fate of Franklin', 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets, ed. Alistair Paterson, Pilgrims South Press, Dunedin, 1980, 63-76 (American edition, Grove Press, New York, 1983, 63-76).

'More contrived Corridors', T. S. Eliot Annum no. 1, Macmillan, London, 1990, 221-2.6.

Edited:

Landfall 12.3 (Special Poets and Critics Issue) (June 1977), 95.

North and South (being Poetry Australia, no. 110: Special New Zealand Poetry Issue) South Head Press: Sydney, 1987, 88.

Hazard Poets No. 1 (Rob Allan). Hazard Press: Christchurch, 1991, 64.

Hazard Poets No. 2 (Graham Lindsay). Hazard Press: Christchurch, 1991, 54.

Hazard Poets No. 3 (David Howard). Hazard Press: Christchurch, 1991, 48.

Hazard Poets No. 4 (Mike Minehan). Hazard Press: Christchurch, 1991, 64.

Major Articles:

'Long-legged eye: more views of Surrealism', Southern Review 6, no. 1 (1973), 71- 79.

'View from the white cliffs: a close look at one manifestation of English Surrealism', Twentieth Century Literature no. 1, (21 February 1975), 72-80.

'Byzantium revisited: a look at the direction of Yeats' philosophical journey in the poem "Byzantium" ', Southern Review 8, no. 3, (November 1975), 236-46.

'Man and mandala: symbol as structure in a poem by Dylan Thomas', Ariel 7, no. 4, (October 1976), 2,2,-33.

'Black and white: the balanced view in Yeats' poetry', Ariel 9, no. 4, (October 1978), 79-91.

'Pond down south?' Climate 2,8 (Autumn 1978), 72-80.

'The Phantom escapes?' AUMLA 50 (November 1978), 2,71-77.

'Ted Hughes: Surrealist?' Dada/Surrealism 8 (1978), 134-45.

'Patterned to perfection: the conclusion of Four Quartets" Southern Humanities Review 16, no. 3 (Summer 1982), 201-09.

'An impossible freedom: some thoughts on the poetry of Allen Curnow', Pilgrims 9 (1982), 61-68.

'Sequence and consequence: some thoughts on recent Australian poetry', Poetry Australia 89 (August 1983), 63-70.

'Ways of failing: the poetry of James K. Baxter', Landfall 37 (September 1983), 335- 47.

Reviews and Shorter Articles:

'Book notes', Untold 2, (Spring 1984), 59-60.

'Establishing a distance', Landfall 106 (June 1973), 162-67.

'Modes of immortality', Landfall 107 (September 1973), 265-72.

'The young New Zealand poets', Landfall 110 (June 1974), 167-70.

'Inscription on a paper dart', Landfall 112, (December 1974), 353-63.

'Quesada', Landfall 114 (June 1975), 164-67.

'Searching for home ground', Landfall 115 (September 1975), 251-57.

'Walking in the snow', Landfall 120 (December 1976), 369-70.

'The antipodean paradise ... lost?' Pilgrims 8 (Summer 1980), 64-70.

'Michael Jackson', Landfall 137 (June 1981), 220-23.

'Karanga', Landfall 143 (September 1982,), 352-6.

'You will know when you get there', Landfall 144 (December 1982), 497-502.

'Landslides', CRNLE Reviews Journal I (1987), 104-08.

'Tares in paradise?' Landfall 168 (December 1988), 459-61.

Notes

(1.) C. K. Stead, The New Poetic (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1964).

(2.) Landfall 120 (December 1976), 322.

(3.) Climate 28 (Autumn 1978), 71.

(4.) As most of the poems in Hemispheres are relatively conventional in structure, a more positive response might have been expected. 'Slaughterhouse: A Story about Time', however, foreshadows some of the major characteristics of most of Jackman's work--the Poundian influences, the broken lines and the staccato effects.

(5.) cf. Canto I, Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).

(6.) In Auckland, an American bridgehead had already been established by Roger Horrocks and Wystan Curnow, who provided the Freed poets with much of their impetus.

(7.) This is not to denigrate the value of the two presses' continuing support of New Zealand writing--nor of Caxton's having published Hemispheres in 1976.

(8.) Landfall's involvement in these aspects of literature begin somewhere in the early eighties--perhaps with Mike Doyle's article, 'The Poetics of C. K. Stead', Landfall 144 (December 1982).

(9.) Arthur the King was originally printed by Leo Bensemann of the Caxton Press and privately distributed in a limited edition of 150 copies.

(10.) Despite his studies at Auckland University under K. Stead in the late sixties and early seventies, the interests Jackaman brought with him from the UK appear to be more important as continuing influences on his work.

(11.) (Christchurch: Christ's College, College Writers, 1977), p. 14.

(12.) Creative Writing: Creative Reading, p. 16.

(13.) Those whose work was published in, or were producing the Auckland journal Freed 1969-72.

(14.) 'Crowhurst' is based on the last voyage of Donald Crowhurst, who entered the 1968 Sunday Times singlehanded round the world yacht race, faked his log book and disappeared from his vessel in mid-Atlantic.

(15.) Creative Writing.. Creative Reading, p. t6.

(16.) Landfall 149 (March 1984), 110-14.

(17.) Lauder's opinion rests on Marxist critical theory--a belief in texts referring to external reality. It implies that the value of poetry rests in the social and historic events 'out there' in the 'real' world. Other theories are also available and as Lyotard says (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington and Massumi: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), perhaps readers should sustain 'an incredulity towards metanarratives' and distrust critical evaluations grounded on universal principles of human behaviour.

(18.) The New Zealand Listener, 21 August 1982.

(19.) Poetry Australia 88 (June 1983), 70.

(20.) This information was provided by the poet.

(21.) The title Riccarton Suite refers to the Christchurch suburb, to the idea of a musical 'suite' and ironically, a suite of rooms or furniture.

(22.) cf. 'Lone Kauri Road' in Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects (Catspaw Press, 1972): 'Print was busy with what print does ...'

(23.) Canto CXVI: 'To make Cosmos--/To achieve the possible--/... the record / the palimpsest--/ a little light in great darkness--.'

(24.) Ian Wedde, 'Castaly', in Islands 5, no. 1 (September 1976), 2-8.

(25.) Palimpsest, p. 9.

(26.) Distances was still in preparation at the time of writing.